There’s national ambivalence about ourcapital city. Its broad avenues, late-colonial architecture and general air ofwell-ordered self-importance go well with popular notions of what the nation’sseat of government should be like. But there’s also another stereotype: thatDelhi typifies an India that has lost its soul. With its black money, five-starhotels and shopping malls, Delhi is a place where tradition, culture and historyhave given way to the flyover and the fast-food counter.
So what if Delhi is, as the intelligentsia claim, a parvenu city? It wasrecreated by those who had lost everything in 1947—men and women of thePunjab, uprooted Sikhs and Hindus, rejects of history who had to carve out theirown futures. They worked and struggled and sweated to make it. They wereunencumbered by the baggage of the past, for the past had betrayed them. Theysucceeded, and as a result of their efforts, created the first trulypost-colonial Indian city.
So families, which had trudged across the Frontier as refugees, today driveshiny Hondas across flyovers; people whose parents had lost their houses now sipimported wine in fancy restaurants. But instead of applauding them, educatedIndians sneer at their crass materialism, lamenting the transformation of aDelhi that was once a byword for elegant poetry, Mughal manners and courtlycivilisation.
Old Delhi may indeed have had its attractions, but it was also a moribund placesteeped in decay and disease, ossified in communal and caste divisions,exploitative and unjust. Today’s New Delhi—not the musty bureaucraticedifices of government but the throbbing, thriving agglomeration of factoriesand TV studios, industrial fairgrounds and software consultancies, night clubsand restaurants—is a city that reflects the vigour and vitality of those whohave made it. It is far and away India’s richest city; it provides andreflects a stimulus, unfamiliar to the Indian intelligentsia, of enterprise andrisk-taking; its people are open and outward looking. They may have forgottentheir history but they remember their politics. They may not know why but theyknow how.
In its urban openness and economic energy, Delhi reminds me, in fact, of thebustling coastal ports of a bygone era. With the advent of jet travel, youdon’t need port cities as your principal contacts with the outside world: the‘coast’ can move inland. New Delhi is India’s contemporaryequivalent—bustling, heterodox, anti-ritual, prosperous.
For all its inadequacies, it is a symbol of a country on the move, the urbanflagship of a better tomorrow. It will lead India into the 21st century, even atthe price of forgetting all that happened in the other 20.
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This piece appeared in the October issue of Delhi City Limits.
